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In the spirit of the movie Hoosiers, Trumpet Call to Victory tells the story of a small parochial high school located in the Pennsylvania coalfields that reached the summit of basketball glory in the late 1960s. Glorious victories and heartbreaking defeats are chronicled on Saint Gabriel's path to capturing multiple state championships. Unsung heroes and scholastic superstars take center stage during what, in the last five years of the school's existence, can only be described as a 'golden age.' The feats of the greatest player in the region's history are chronicled as is the beginning of a career for a coach who arranged to have a young Bobby Knight address his state championship team at the school's sports banquet. That coach, Richard "Digger" Phelps, recently recalled his first head coaching job in a tweet which read, "St. Gabes was my first step to ND. They made it happen."
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Joe Farley was born and raised in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. His high school graduating class from Hazleton Saint Gabriel's in 1970 was the last in the history of the school. At Saint Gabriel's Mr. Farley demonstrated his academic prowess by graduating 37th in his class of forty. He was the point guard on the school's 1970 state championship basketball team. Those exploits are covered in the book "Trumpet Call to Victory: The Final Years of Hazleton Saint Gabriel's Basketball." Mr. Farley then attended Bloomsburg University where after four dimly remembered years he graduated with a degree in education.
In 1975 Mr. Farley began a 35 year public service career working for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Upon his retirement in 2010 he began work on the Keystone Tombstone series with his coauthor Joe Farrell. To date there are thirteen volumes in that series. Farley and Farrell have also authored Gotham Graves Volumes One and Two. Mr. Farley also penned "Song Poems in Search of Music" in 2014
He and his wife Sharon reside in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. They have three children.
